Life after layoff

My parents are worried about me being unemployed. “Do you have a job yet?” they ask when we talk on the phone. It doesn’t matter how many times I describe my work as a freelance writer and tell them how my profession works. In their minds, if I don’t drive my car away from my house to the same location and sit down to work at the same desk every day, I’m not employed.
I don’t blame them for being worried. For 20 years, I did drive my car to the same parking lot, walk into the same office building and sit at the same desk. I had gotten my job at a mid-sized newspaper shortly after moving to Colorado. It was my dream job. The paper was growing and its owners were investing in its growth. I worked with writers and photographers and artists who were major talents. Our newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize. We covered the Olympics and the state’s pro sports teams just like our much larger competitors. We traveled the country and the world. We were innovators and dreamers and we got to see many of our dreams become realities.
We were good at our jobs and proud of them. We felt powerful and secure. It was still a time when employees, especially employees of newspapers, were rewarded for their good work, for their longevity, for their loyalty.
But things changed. I lost that dream job, unceremoniously dumped in a brief meeting in an icy conference room on a Friday morning. It’s been a little more than two years, and I still can recall how I felt that day. For months, I was defensive and angry. I was laid off, not fired; one of the first groups of casualties in what has become almost daily business at newspapers around the country. But what’s the difference, really? I lost that job, my dream job.
So now I’m a freelance writer. What does that mean, my parents ask. It means I spent every day job hunting. It means reinventing myself, selling myself, working to make myself look more appealing than the competition. It means taking on other jobs that don’t involve writing – a stint as a caretaker at a nature center; a bizarre month working for the U.S. government on the 2010 Census project.
On my best days, I revel in the freedom. My office looks out at the mountains, and I’m often interrupted from my writing by the chirping of a hummingbird gorging himself on the feeder I’ve placed outside my window.
But the irregularity of my profession can be unnerving. Jobs are disappearing as newspaper and magazine companies cut their page counts or cut out major projects. Other companies have eliminated their freelance budgets. Still others have closed.
There’s something kind of thrilling to see what comes to me at the beginning of each month. But it’s kind of like fishing, where on some days, even the most experienced angler doesn’t get any bites. (No, Mom and Dad, that doesn’t mean I spend all my time fishing – it’s just a figure of speech.)